Mr. Carlisle said, what if where you worked resulted in you being able to live a lot longer? "You might never leave the company," he said.

It is the ultimate work benefit, more valuable than free gourmet lunches, or free rides to work.

And the value of a highly talented software engineer is greater the greater your platform. Because their work is easily scaled across the entire platform.

If life extension technologies mean that Google can hire the best engineers in the world then it is worth it, because in addition to being able to scale their work the most efficiently across its global platform — the competition doesn't have them. Google keeps a lot of engineers "on the bench" simply to deny them to competitors.